


Always More to Lose

by Lamprey



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Bad Ending, Corruption, M/M, Mind Games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-03
Updated: 2013-04-03
Packaged: 2017-12-07 09:47:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/747106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lamprey/pseuds/Lamprey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post Low-Chaos, the Outsider seems to be teasing and haunting Corvo to his breaking point and it all comes to a head when Corvo agrees to investigate refugees suspected of worshipping the Outsider.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Always More to Lose

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Dishonored kink-meme: dark seduction ending with an explicit meeting

There are those that look for the Outsider’s touch in everything. In the chill of the wind coming off the water that tingles your cheek, in the gentle rustle of purple drapes tied to small table, in the reflection of blood as it pools beneath a man who has already wasted his last breath on a plea for his life.

They are wrong, he is in none of those things. His touch is cold, the type of cold that sits and settles into your bones and lulls you to a sleep that is never woken. The Outsider is nothing if not proud, and subtlety is practice that he does well to avoid. His touch is a pale, pale bony finger pressing shut bloodied lips, white fingers spread on hips, paler lips hovering a ghost of a touch away from a brand, humming amusements.

His touch is a matter that Corvo knows well, as he would the place on the throat to cut to sever arteries and interrupt screams. And he hasn’t felt it in a year, ever since he placed Emily Kaldwin on the throne and the plague and rats receded and most of those stark white words were scrubbed away.

Corvo tries, every now and then, to take a knife, sandpaper, or steel wool to his left hand and slice and rub and erase the Mark off. Yet when the dried blood on bandages and rusty hard scabs come off, the Mark shines like a new tattoo, its black edges defined, and his hand never scars. Corvo wonders, every now and then, the worth of being one-handed for the rest of his life. He entertains it only briefly; it’s his pistol hand, and there are still enemies of the state about.  
  
He keeps a few pairs of supple leather gloves, black, so no one can see the blood seep from the back of his left hand. There’s always a spare in his back pocket, just in case a flirting noblewoman takes a glove, a hound plays a little too rough, or a giggling Empress takes one, and it’s always the right one, and hides it in one of her sixty hiding spots in the throne room. For even she knows that there are things that she should do well not to over-linger her eyes on.

But there is a man in a gold mask and his eyeless gaze lingers on Corvo’s gloved hands, clasped tightly, right hand over the left. Corvo feels the heat of his stare, or perhaps feels the heat of the throne room as the heat wave outside penetrates and overwhelms the whale-oil fueled cooling fans. Most of the court has abandoned ascots and coats and pants for airy blouses and silk shirts and skirts. Emily does no favors for her age in a sundress the color of freshly-bloomed orchids (and the color of flowing fabrics that glow a soft, otherworldly purple). She swings her legs like pendulums, still not tall enough to reach the floor from her throne. Normally, Corvo would chide her to keep her legs still but heat bears down on them like the bottom of an ocean and swinging legs is all Emily can do to keep a breeze to cool her legs on the hot velvet cushion of her seat.  
  
Corvo and the lone combat overseer accompanying the new High Overseer are clad in the dark blue twill of the empire, coats covering shoulder to wrist, trapping sweat, secrets, and thoughts. They stand opposite like silent, still sentinels, Corvo to the right of Emily, a little behind, the overseer to the right of the High Overseer, a little behind, they wear their masks of blank expression, one of gold-plated metal, the other of flesh and duty. Gold continues to stare at Corvo’s hands, while Corvo watches gold out of the corner of his eye as the High Overseer addresses Emily.

She sits a little straighter to lend her voice a year or two more in age, “I apologize, High Overseer, but we cannot spare any more City Watch officers for your operation.”

“But Your Grace, hunting down these heretics would benefit the stability of the Dunwall and help safeguard it against the influence of the Outsider. The plague may be cured, but we must still be vigilant for other monstrosities that the Outsider and his worshippers may invite into our city.” The overseer in gold mask does not break his stare at Corvo.

Emily’s neck tenses in the beginning motion of a head turn to her right, towards Corvo, but she thinks better of it and draws a slow, steady breath. “I know, and would give you the manpower you need if I could, but the restoration of the Rudshore Financial District has my hands tied, we cannot maintain the camps of displaced survivors within the outskirts of Dunwall Tower any longer.”

The High Overseer bows his white head. “I understand, Your Grace. I apologize for troubling you. May I have your leave? I must return to preparations for our raid.”  
  
“You are dismissed. Luck to you.” Corvo steps forward to gingerly take Emily’s left hand with his left. As her fingers alight, cold, icy tendrils crawl across his skin and the shock of it barrels through his reflexes and his body quakes in a single shiver. He jerks his head towards her face. Stares into her pupils, for any hint of darkened color in her eyes. Gazes at her skin, for any patch of pallor. Looks all around her, for the barest trace of black smoke.

But it is only an eleven year old, with dark brown eyes like her and rosy cheeks flushed red from the heat and with concern knitted across her brow. And her hand is warm and she is waiting. Corvo takes it gently, his fingers wrap wholly around her palm, and she hops off the throne, her sundress dragging on the seat; she tugs it down sheepishly.

Corvo turns towards the overseers, who have already bowed at waist, their torsos parallel to the floor. The High Overseer straightens and leaves without looking at anyone, his red coat flapping behind him. The masked combat overseer straightens, and lingers for a moment. His gold mask with the black, angry pits for eyes lingers its gaze on Corvo before turning and following his leader out.

Corvo suppresses a shiver.

*** 

He stands guard that night in front of Emily’s bedroom, not even leaning on the giant carved rosewood doors. Sleep pulls at him like a tide stealing grains of sand from a beach, but the start of a falling motion jerks him awake the fifth time, the twentieth time, the hundredth time.

Every moment he starts to fall is a instant of terror that when his face meets the beautifully patterned carpets from Morley that it won’t be floor his cheek touches, but stone in such tones of gray. Or white marble splashed with blood that trickles towards him, like it seeks his hand to hold. Or something from his past and something from his future and a place he’s never seen and never will. Perhaps he will just never meet a floor and just fall and fall into an endless hole, a hole ruled by a chasm in the form of a man that will swallow him whole.

His face does not meet the carpeted floors for the entire night.

***

“You look tired, Corvo, did you sleep last night?” Emily pulls Corvo’s skin down from his left eye as she leans on the back of the chair, her knees bouncing lightly on the velvet cushion of her seat.

“Not well,” he lies, gently pushing away her hand. “Please sit properly, they are going to arrive any minute, now.”

“But it’s too hot to sit on the sweaty seat! And finance is boring and I know nothing of it!”  
  
“I know, just bear with it for an hour and I will ask Josephine to fix a bowl of iced cream for you and we can stand next to the fans.” Before Emily can shout and bounce her delight, he stops her with a single, raised finger outfitted in black. “Only, only if you sit still and behave like an empress.”

Emily is content with this bargain, and twirls and bounces once, then twice on the cushion as the twin brass handles affixed in cherry swivel down and open towards them. Master of Finance, Lord Thomas Hertford sweeps in with a stern-faced noblewoman, still in the suited attire of her class with a sheen of sweat on her forehead and on her swept back dusty blonde hair. She clutches a wide fan made of scented sandalwood close to her chest, gives it quick, small flaps and its aroma floats in circles around the room.

Lord Hertford bows with his ledger under his armpit. “Your Grace. Lord Protector.”

The lady bows stiffer than him. “Pleased to meet your, Your Grace. And you also, Lord Protector.” Her tone is cool and cordial.

“Lord Hertford, Lady Pendleton. Please be seated.” Corvo gestures to the seats closest to the empress on the long chestnut table. They pull the seats back and pull it forward so they are at eye level with the empress.

It is Lady Pendleton who begins even before she is settled into her seat. “May I have your decision regarding my proposal?”

Lord Hertford coughs. “Yes, and the Empress is prepared to forgive your family and clear the Pendleton name for the role they had in her abduction if you agree to finance the repairs to be made to the buildings in the Rudshore Financial District.”

Corvo is the only one that sees her cheek twitch as she clenches her teeth. “I’m afraid we only have enough money to finance only a fourth of that. My cousins borrowed a large sum of money from me before their demises and our gold mines have stopped producing a year ago.”  
  
 _She lies to ensure her daughter’s future, who throws lavish tea parties that will envy the Boyle parties in time._

Corvo’s eyes go wide as her mournful words trail away in his head. He darts his gaze to Emily, to the Master of Finance, to Lady Pendleton; they have not reacted. They did not hear her. The words are for his ears only.

_She spat into his coffin when no one was looking._

Hidden behind Emily’s tall chair and the lively discussion on Pendleton fortunes (or lack thereof), he reaches with his left hand that almost tremble into his pocket. His fingers press into cold flesh that hums and whirrs and his hand recoils as if jolted with lightning.

It was locked away. Hidden in an iron chest, shackled with steel, locked with brass, wrapped and wrapped and wrapped again in black cloth with only a smiling skull mask for company and buried under a floorboard with a woven tapestry made by Pandyssian hands swept over it. Corvo has not held the Heart since Emily flew into his arms high in the sky.

It is now in his pocket. It speaks to him without his consent. He looks at Lord Hertford.

“-without your financial help, I’m afraid we won’t have enough pull to grant you and your sister seats at Parliament-”

_He pockets a few gold coins at a time. He always returns them the next day._

The words echo and bounce around and around his head and he keeps looking at all their faces to see if they can hear. His mouth has gone so, so dry, he darts his eyes around the room and looks and ponders every reflection; on the cabinets, on the surface of the table, on the glint the glasses with water and ice give off. His eyes are dark from lack of sleep and they stare back at him, but they are not black. This relieves him little, the Heart continues to speak to him in that cold tone of hers.

“-I can back, at most, a third of the repairs, and once we finish the dreadful affair of settling the twins and Treavor’s accounts, I can-”  
  
 _On her wedding day, the twins wanted something from her. She gave them nothing but scars. They did not speak with her for years._

“-hands are tied if word gets out of your cousins’ slave mines, your seats would then go to Lord Wickham who is not sympathetic to-”  
  
 _He’s afraid of you. On sleepless nights, he can almost feel the blade prick his throat and he screams his regrets and his walls swallow his terror.  
  
_ He slides his eyes off Lord Hertford, his heart races like the Heart does when fragments of _him_ are nearby. He tries to look down at the top of Emily’s head.

_She doesn’t draw anymore._

Corvo jerks his head away from Emily and down at his left hand, clenched and gloved and hidden.

_You’re so lonely._

His mouth opens and his throat spasms as a sob tries to claw its way out. He closes his eyes to dam up all that is rushing up, tears, cries, his heart (what’s left of it).

“Corvo...are you well?” Emily asks as Lord Hertford and Lady Pendleton drone on in the background. Corvo does not dare to open his eyes.

“Yes, just resting my eyes.” He opens them slowly and stares straight ahead, taking care to not look at Emily, or Lord Hertford, or Lady Pendleton.

And especially not at himself.

The meeting drags for another hour before Corvo takes out the royal seal and avoids all eyes as Emily grasps its handle and presses its mark on the written agreement between Lady Pendleton and the crown. Lord Hertford escorts the Lady out, the doors groan open and shut.  
  
Corvo begs leave and the Empress objects and he avoids the disappointment in her eyes as walks out, eyes on the dark wood floor. He mutters a command to the guards posted outside the door and he can hear one of them call out to the Empress to take her down to see Josephine as he climbs one, two, three steps at a time up to his room. His view changes from wood to carpets to metal to wood again and then he dares to look up at the doors to his room and pushes them in.  
  
He takes one corner of the tapestry and chucks it to the side in a heap. Corvo sinks to his knees and counts the planks; he flicks out his knife and slides the tip in the corner of the sixteenth one and the floorboard comes up with too loud of a creak, accompanied by softly swirling dust clouds. Urgency stiffens his hand as he gropes into the black fabric and finds the corner of the chest and drags it out, still tangled in the rest of the black fabric. It takes him twenty nervous minutes, but he untangles the faded black fabric, unlocks the brass lock with one of the keys hanging around his neck, and turns the key in the lock on the chest itself. He flings the top open and it knocks on itself as it overextends.

Corvo drops the chest and clambers back, dragging his flank and heels on the ground, the back of his left hand to his mouth but the smell of decay assails his nose and his mouth. The rat’s mouth is slightly open, rot has pulled the skin from its large incisors. Its skin is loose and black around the green intestines, pooling in something Corvo doesn’t want to know. The blood is brown, but still sticky with a shine to it, and the pool of blood forms an island around the mask.

It stares at him, four glints in its eyes, grinning as if at a secret joke. Corvo takes it out, and rotates it in his hand; there is not a single spot of grime from the rotted rat on it.

Corvo forces his window open of all the safeguards to keep it closed and the wind nearly smothers him as it blasts him in the face high above. The chest and its rat inhabitant sail in a slowly tumbling arc out the window, and some entrails float out like a rope thrown into the river. He considers the mask in his hand as the wind whips his hair around, and then throws the mask. It flips red and gunmetal in the sun and he imagines the crash of it dashing to pieces on the rocks below. He thinks (he hopes) that no one will make an inquiry of smashed lenses and bent gears.  
  
Slamming the window closed, he gropes under his bed and takes out a small wooden box. He throws aside the lid and upends some yellowed letters into the wastebasket. The heart makes a soft, wet plop when he throws it in. The chains make a musical clinking as he wraps it around and around the box. Fabric rustles around and around and wood shifts as it meets wood and the tapestry is swept over it. Heavy breathing shudders from Corvo’s lips.

He hopes the beating in his ears is his own heart.

***

Corvo does not sleep in his own bed. He does not sleep in it for two days. Or three. It is impossible to tell, if the sun has risen or sunk below the horizon. A bluish haze colors everything he sees and clings to faces, to objects, to anything with a shine to it. He reasons sluggishly that at least they are not shadows.

His fingernails are stunted from his stay in Coldridge where the Head Torturer tore them off with a rusted pair of pliers, and the thick skin of his scars and the discolorings on his body tell of his heightened pain tolerance. Rules out most methods for him. He has only few options available to him that still cause him physical pain, and lacks a Head Torturer (by a head) to inflict those meager options.

There’s a place on his body that still feels pain, and he takes his knife to it when his lids slide their way down his eyes, he sinks the tip into blackened skin and twists to open the gash. The flash of pain peels his eyelids open as warm red slides down his hand to collect on the black fabric he has laid down (never purple, never ever).

In the day, appointments and councillors and grievances and redresses keep his consciousness propped up on a shaky brace of responsibility and concern. There is not a second he can spare to sleep on his feet. Not with eleven year old eyes that look to him to rule, to be her shield, to be always behind her.

At night, it’s only his left hand and his knife to keep the dreams away.  
  
***  
  
“The High Overseer has come to beg at our feet again?” spits Lord Tilbury, one of Emily’s councillors, a harsh man with harsh features. “Why have you let him into the throne room to waste our time?”  
  
“He comes bearing important tidings,” Lord Hertford titters, adjusting almost over-large glasses that perch on his nose. He looks like a wet, small dog pulled from the rain.

“That is ever a vague of an explanation.”  
  
“He emphasized it was important that it was heard in full audience, with the Empress surrounded by her finest,” elaborates Lady Aveley, an older woman with close-cropped gray hair and sharp eyes.  
  
“I mislike the sound of that,” broods Tilbury. Corvo misliked it, too, which is why he had a full garrison of guards standing still on either side. 

“Enough,” finishes Corvo, curt and pass caring if it was. His left hand stings and it darkens his mood. “Show him in.”

The gigantic mahogany doors creak in and the High Overseer strides in, followed by a group of four gold masks. He brings a draft of hot air from the hallway that cools quickly in the throne room, with its now functioning cooling fans that whip and give a buzzing drone to the air. There’s a fifth man behind them. Bearing the heavy weight of a black box with gold trappings, his gloved hand on the crank.  
  
Corvo keeps his face masked with stillness and disinterest and pops the bubbles of panic floating to the surface. His even voice does not betray his unease. “What is the meaning of bringing these combat overseers into Her Grace’s presence?”

“Lord Protector, Lords and Ladies, Your Grace, I have come to emphasize the importance of hunting down heretics. They can-” He holds his hands in front and undulates his fingers “slither into all levels of our society and even penetrate where you least expect.” He walks an irregular circle, his hands now behind him, sliding his look to Lord, to Lady, to Empress, to Corvo. He lingers his stare.

He stops as the last combat overseer walks forward, leading with the music box. “I have reason to believe that an agent of the Outsider is here in this very room.”

A restive din starts to rumble from the carpeted throne room up to the rapidly swiveling necks of the audience in the room. Neighbors and friends and enemies turn towards each other with suspicion, with terror hiding in the murky depths. The beating of Corvo’s heart is so loud, it seems to be coming from as close as his throat. He pats his pockets and finds them empty. It does little to sate the hammering.

“We are going to play the pure music and out the heretic.” The High Overseer’s last words are overtaken with a roar as Lords and Ladies clamor away from each other, while some cry folly and recklessness, their objections drown like rain in a river. Corvo strides forward from behind Emily, who strains forward on her seat with a look of concern that befits a grownup, and not an eleven-year-old child. He plants himself in front of her, a shield, in more ways than one.

“What will you do once you out the Outsider’s follower?” The uproar recedes from the echo of Corvo’s question.

“Interrogate them, before we hang them.” A few in the audience murmur their agreements.

“You are putting the Empress’s life in danger with this madness.” Corvo forms fists in his hand and his left hand throbs as much as his heart.

The High Overseer gives him a mocking grin with eyes that are so sharp. “Question is, are you?” He casually lifts his hand as the Overseers approach Corvo in a row, releasing their swords and pistols from their scabbards and holsters and an uproar erupts from the onlookers. Then the air turns to needles as the music box cranks out its cacophony note by awful note.

And Corvo is stiller than frozen water. The music hits like scalding water and turns all his molecules to fire, and he does not so much as blink. Each note is like a dagger plunging over and over into his ear drums and his mind and he does not twitch. Each wave threatens to drown him, to knock his knees from under him and curl him into twitching mass of pain and blasphemy. Corvo will not let it.

He will not be dragged away from the Empress for the second time.

He squeezes his right hand until the leather over-stretches and threads start to escape from the seams. The pain in his hand plunges him in ice and and overwhelms the music and it lances through his entire body like one big crack blossoming into many others. The music feels like mere scalds compared to his left hand, the skin on top stabbed to a bloody ruin and ribbons of flesh and black held together only by the covering of the glove.

It’s a familiar pain.

Corvo forces a small part of his willpower to turn his eyes towards the High Overseer and fix him with an angry stare. He desperately hopes his face wears offense fringed with rage. The High Overseer recoils, Corvo’s contemptuous look hits like a bullet and he meets the stares of the court as he twists his head round and around in confusion.

“I don’t understand,” he manages to say before a scream that could curdle all the blood in Dunwall echoes from the left side of the throne. The people gathered on the left side scream themselves as they run to the other side, passing the overseers approaching Corvo and leave a man curled on the floor, twitching spittles of vomit from his mouth that stain his light brown jacket, his pupils retreated fully into his eyelids.

The music cuts off like the dagger that cuts through the combat overseer’s head, the tip sticks out red from the gold mask’s mouth slit, and a wet gurgle accompanies the crash of the music box to the floor, its gears and screws chime on the floor and its wood splinter apart with deafening cracks and Corvo sucks in a shuddering breath that no one hears and fights to remain on his knees. The High Overseer runs towards Corvo before the combat overseer’s body crumples fully to the floor, one of the City Watch guards standing behind him, his sword trembling with flecks of blood, his body twitching with pain and craze and eyes so dark (but not fully black). His whole body seems held up purely by desperation. The other overseers turn their heads.

He holds out his hand and reality bends around him, and he dissolves with a pop. Corvo gasps as the Void touches him with a small ripple and it sends a shiver that settles in between every bone in his spine. Everyone is moving as if impeded by water except for the rogue officer. Corvo watches the crazed City Watch officer materialize from shimmering air and slide his knife across covered throats below expressionless gold masks, a string of red following its tip like a streamer until four arcs of blood hang suspended in the air and he turns towards the High Overseer, his head turned back, his mouth and eyes open in frozen terror.  
  
The City Watch officer advances to the High Overseer with his blade lifted and brings it down.

The color drains from the world all at once and dust motes and blood suspend in amber light as Corvo’s surprised moan pierces the still space. Corvo steps in front of the High Overseer, his sword spins itself out of its place and he catches the hilt and slides it through the attacker’s sword hand, arm and severed hand remains suspended as if the blade has only cut through butter. The world catches up as he plunges the knife past twill, cotton, the taut muscles between neck and shoulder and the City Watch officer’s body crumples to the ground and takes Corvo’s sword with him. Screams and commotion thunder and swell in the throne room as the other four overseers fall to the ground with red grins in their necks. There is a black shadow behind where the attacker was and it moves with its right hand above its head, imbued in a cool glow.

Leathered left hand meets the small fist and Corvo yells as the wind blast strips his leather glove to shreds and flays his fingertips and patterns his hand with many red slivers. The pale small woman in maid’s clothes gazes up at Corvo with her widening sunken eyes and disheveled brown hair with her disarrayed bun. He can see the whites of her eyes and she wears a fearful expression far more terror-filled than even the High Overseer.  
  
“Y-you’re His-” A firecracker cuts the screams and her next words become a gasp as a red poppy blooms on the white of her undershirt, she clutches at it in confusion before her knees betray her and she drops to her knees, coughs up a small splatter of blood and crumples to the side. Her eyes are open and see nothing.  
  
Corvo swivels to see the High Overseer on his back with outstretched pistol, a smoke trail winding itself out of the trembling barrel. Corvo wrinkles his nose at the warm smell of urine wafting from the High Overseer.

“H-how did you move that fast?” he manages in between his shaking lips.

Corvo does not answer, his left hand drips blood from multiple places. Everyone is looking at him. Emily’s standing, holding her arms at the elbows. She is too much like her mother, every awkward angle on her points towards worry. With a snarl, he grabs his right hand’s glove by the middle and index and rips off the ruined leather and throws it harshly against the ground. He holds up his hand and turns it back to front, turning around to show every cowering corner.  
  
“Would you like me to strip to the bare to prove you my innocence?” roars Corvo, so deafening against the stunned mute audience. No one answers. There’s a few shakes of the head from the Lords and Ladies. He scoffs with derision and bends down to slide his blade out, gives it a swipe that sprinkles the ground with blood and folds it back up. He looms over the High Overseer.

“You are prohibited from the throne room so as long as Emily rules. Any suspicions or investigation your Abbey wants to launch into our ranks must be brought forward to me and the Council. Pull a foolhardy spectacle like that again, and you will have made an enemy of the throne. And of me.” The High Overseer’s cheek clench into lines and he nods once, so tight. Corvo extends a hand and pulls him roughly to his feet. “You will work with us in investigating what transpired here. Lastly, I will aid you in hunting down these heretics.”

The High Overseer snorts in spite of himself. “Just you?” He shrieks as Corvo lunges and grabs him roughly by his too tight collar and lifts, his toes scrap on the ground with rubbery squeaks. One look at the rage-carved face of the Lord Protector sends him to soil his pants again.

“I am _more_ than enough for the likes of you.”

***  
  
“I’m the _empress._ ”

“You’re _eleven._ ”

“I deserve to know.”

Corvo sits in the deep blue velvet chair, the texture rubbed off on the armrests. He leans forward with his bare hand and bandaged hand clasped, never comfortable in a chair. Even before cold bars and colder walls and a cold body in a beautiful oak coffin.  
  
Emily sits upright on her tall bed in her breezy long nightgown with a pattern of small pansies (purple, Corvo notices with unease), there’s pale pink ruffles along the shoulders and the armholes and tiny pink bows here and there. She’s grasping her elbows again, and there isn’t a pout sticking her lower lip out. _An empress in the shell of a child,_ he thinks.

He looks at her eyes and the resemblance to her mother sticks like a knife plunged to the hilt in his throat. They’ve seen suffering, they’ve seen life and blood and wits and light go out of a person, they’ve seen thin walls and locked doors and the burlap texture of a bag shoved over her head. They have such weariness in them that it almost breaks what’s left of his heart.

Corvo sighs, “Barnet Grantham is a smaller lord in the lower house. He’s well-liked for his push for welfare and equality for the lower social classes, and he’s well-hated for his supposed godlessness. He’s opposed every measure the Abbey has brought forward. The Abbey wanted to take him for interrogation, but seems his wits and sense are gone for good from the pure music so I have had him infirmed in the asylum.”  
  
“Is he going to get better?”

Corvo rubs the back of his left hand, it’s been wrapped so tightly that he cannot bend it. “Likely not, no. It’s a wonder he didn’t collapse immediately from the music.”  
  
Emily presses her lips together and he sees her steal a glance at his left hand before staring into his eyes. He avoids her look and continues.

“ _She_ was a maid who has been employed here for five years. Abigail Verwood, she was Lord Grantham’s mistress for longer than that. We raided her living quarters, and we found a shrine in her locked armoire, it looks to have been maintained for years. We even found a rune and a couple charms, which the Abbey confiscated. Seems she got her lover into the practices and sacrifices, we found traces of both their bloods on the shrine after I had Piero examine it.”

She nods and blinks, as if trying to banish dust from her eyes. “Why did she do it? I mean, not kill those people, that was the music making her crazy, I know. But why did she decide to worship the Outsider?”  
  
Corvo raises his head slowly and regards Emily. An uncomfortable silence passes for a few moments before Corvo answers, “We don’t know yet, but someone like her? Unassuming, without incident for all those years? Perhaps she was trying to protect something. Or working towards something. But I think it is no coincidence that she tried to kill the High Overseer in the midst of the Abbey’s raid planning.”

“When will the raids start?”  
  
“Tomorrow, and continue for at least two weeks. Callista and her uncle will be by your side until I get back.” He hopes for a excited, bouncy, an altogether eleven-year-old reaction from Emily but she does not yelp in excitement, or clap, or scream, “Yay!” like she usually does. Instead, she just sighs.

“Can I ask you a question, Corvo?”  
  
“Anything.”  
  
“Could I stop them? If they came to take you away?”

He allows himself a smile, though it is sad and so full of exhaustion. “No, you couldn’t.”  
  
“Even though I’m the empress?”  
  
“Especially. You’d lose so much support and earn the ire of the Abbey. I couldn’t let you do it.”  
  
“What about him?” She points at his bandaged hand and Corvo jerks away from it and the question like a red brand inching towards his face. He opens his mouth, and clenches it closed, his muscles tight and visible on his cheeks.

The words gets stuck. His reassurance that he will never leave Emily’s side, that he’s strong enough to fight the Void and its pull, that the Outsider and his colorless realm are nothing to him.  
  
But she will hear them like she hears Corvo’s assurances that he gets enough sleep every night. Instead, he replies, “I don’t know.”

They sit in silence before Emily hops off her bed and clambers under her quilted comforter, her head propped up by pillows with ruffles on their edges. “Could you read me something?”  
  
He hasn’t read to her since her ascension, when Corvo came to tuck her into bed and she looked up at Corvo clutching the book to his heart and said she did not need stories anymore.

Corvo knows that Emily is no longer the girl, but he can pretend as much as she can pretend to be the girl again and picks a book from her dusty bookshelves and sits down and cracks the spine open. He begins a tale, with upbeat tempos and words that he emphasizes with sing-song tones. About a pirate with a ruby in his eye who sails a ship with tattered sails in the sky and plunders the towns on mountain peaks. The only oceans are the ones that the clouds form when they are flat and wide and luminous. He skips the mention of the leviathans that fly in herds, singing songs in words only they know, heralding storms, celebrating the sun, serenading the moon, and mocking the foolish humans afraid of heights.

Her eyes get heavy and she slips the comforter up to her sleepy eyes as the pirate captain is locked in a deathmatch with his younger brother, an admiral sworn to bring down his older brother. Corvo switches to a poem, speaking in rhythm and rhymes ease her into deep sleep.

“ _The say that Jimmy Whitcomb Riley,  
_ _Was a brawler his mates called Smiley,  
_ _He ran around, up and down-town,  
_ _Pulling off every crime-y_.

 _On Bottle Street, he hunts with boys,  
_ _Throwing bricks and glass and other toys,  
_ _They’d start a fight then run and hide.  
_ _Breaking, laughing, far and wide._ ”

Emily breathes soft, her eyes closed completely. He puts the book down and stares at her for a bit before he continues, just to finish the poem out. Then he’ll retreat to his room and take out a knife from his drawer and carve more red patterns into his left hand.  
  
“ _Sitting on a bridge along John Clavering.  
_ _When he woke, something strange he found.  
_ _Stranger than a hole in the world.  
_ _He’d become a whale in the dream-world._ ”

Corvo stops, the words blur into black spots and he shakes his head and everything focuses again.

“ _And only remembered his name was Corvo._  
They say that Lord Protector Corvo  
 _Was never seen again for all of time-y.  
_ _But he swam around, up and down.  
_ _Drinking from the Void, crying “Why me?_ ”

His mind delays the words but when they catch up, Corvo shoots up and the book tumbles out of his lap and falls through a jagged hole in the floor, down and down. The walls in Emily’s bedroom are gone, and the mismatched eyes of Mrs. Pilson look up at Corvo from under the covers on the bed as dresser, curtains, desks, and everything bend the wrong way and twirl so gently in the air.

The Void is endless, and Corvo’s scream does not come echoing back.

***

It’s a long time before he stops screaming, or a short time, time is a human concept and has no bearing in this realm of his and Corvo’s throat does not go raw from the screaming. In his panic, he’s fallen a dozen times already and every time he’s fallen far enough, the air sucks out of his lungs and the intense pressure puts his head, his heart, his everything in a vise and the moment his eyeballs pop out is the moment he’s on his hands and knees on a floating piece of the Void, breathing in shakes. Always lands in the Void, and not on a bedroom floor where the air is stuffy but real.  
  
He gives up the falls, and walks sideways out of the parody of Emily’s bedroom (it’s Dunwall Tower and her Golden Cat room and the tower at Hound Pits and her room up high smashed all together). Trolleys on electric tracks criss cross in chaotic directions and he can see a line of various-shaped objects floating up into the foggy grays, linked by small gaps, chains, and such. Corvo could walk, jump, climb his way across without using the black mark on his hand. The perceived ease of it disquiets him.

Corvo gazes down at his hand and is relieved to see it still wrapped tight in bandages, the pain still present in throbs, his fingers and bones still stiff. He presses index and thumb to the middle, the pain grits his teeth and shuts his eyes but when he opens his eyes, the Void still all around him. He tries a small pinch to his cheek and it yields nothing either.

The tracks rumble and crackle to herald the approach of a trolley coming up from the bottom of the Void. Corvo takes careless steps to the edge of the side of the tower, and leans down to see the trolley get bigger, its inside on its outside and bodies wrapped in white and plague stuck to the surface like maggots. He steps off and is dashed to pieces by the force of the trolley.

Corvo wakes up curled in a ball some distance away from the sideways tower, on a velvet chair with worn armrests standing on one leg on worn carpet, the Void yawning leisurely around him, his body shaking off the death spasms of just a moment before. Despair sits like rocks in his stomach, resignation sours the taste in his mouth, and he gets up and looks in the distance of the purposefully-linked pieces of the Void, gaining in height in the distance, and begins to walk.

He goes through scenarios in his head, as he walks carefully on a large, rusted chain with the Void on either side, to a chunk of rock with a burned orchard, the black trees like cracks in the sky and green apples blushing red that turn to ash under the sole of Corvo’s boots. Imagines his defiant shouting or begging done on grovelling knees, says the words (“Leave me be”) in his head over and over and in a thousand variations.

But the words feel empty even when he says it aloud.

The orchard island has floating stone steps leading up that sink gently when Corvo steps on them. They lead to a door carved from his childhood and it opens into a giant hall with corpses seated at a feast. There are cups and silverware in their hands and crows’ beaks in their eyes, and they are presided over by a man with a wolf’s head and a crown made of ice, his hand thrust out with a goblet of wine, frozen in a toast. There’s a window behind him and the drapes are purple and faded, flapping gently with no wind and Corvo knows that there is a forgotten needle tucked into its corner, a thread of frayed purple thread tailing from the eyehole. He avoids looking too deeply into the faces of the dead, in case _she_ is hidden somewhere in the party. He pushes the drapes aside and clambers onto the sill, looking up to see a giant gnarled root going up from the mansion’s exterior.

Unsure, he bends his left hand until the bandages fray and tear and bites back a hiss as blood seeps out a little. He places hand on knot and by the time he stumbles his body to the glass roof (and what a lovely greenhouse it protects), his hand is a wet tangle of soaked bandages and flesh. He rolls to see yet another walkway to the next piece of Void, this time it’s a bridge of rotting wood over a waterfall that falls into nothing and the wood is strong and steady as Corvo walks to a twisted monstrosity of the tower that Daud called home.  
  
The isles blend together, he walks across the peak of a mountain and along the gangplank of a ship with tattered sails with a captain with a ruby in his left eye socket and bones instead of fleshy hands, he struggles through a tangle of rope and nets with all sorts of sea and land creatures caught in a still of their desperate escapes, and so many twisted rooms that inspire nostalgia, fear, dread, even happiness in his recollections. The moments pass as short as instants and as long as centuries.

It’s around the hundredth isle (a tilted corridor full of glowing kelp) that terror seizes him. That there will be no way out of this, out of the Void. That his body never wakes and turns to bones and ash and Emily has grown into a woman with gray in her hair and grandchildren in her lap. He can also see an assassin plunging steel into Emily’s cream blouse (it blossoms so red and complements her skin) and Emily with the Mark on the inside of her wrist, summoning rats to devour her court and these are so clear in his head that he is frightened they are visions and not his paranoid imaginings. He speeds through the next hundred isles before exhaustion beyond body, soul, endurance, and pain slows his pace and he finds himself looking up into the interior of an enormous rib-cage of a whale, the tips of its tail embedded into the stone at his feet.

The shattered parts of bone cuts at his hands as he grabs them and climbs up but all he feels is the wet cling of his coat to skin as rivulets of blood run down his hands from between his fingers. Each thrust and pull and scrabble of his boots (and slips and desperate dangles of his hands) is an eternity gone by. _Does Emily have grandkids and great grandkids?_ he wonders. _Was her line extinguished when I wasn’t there to protect her?_ he fears. _Is she the one that finds me dead in my chair?_  
  
Corvo finally clasps the edge of the gigantic empty eye socket and he pulls himself inside and collapses his forehead against black floors. The surface is so smooth, and so black, it does not hold a shine. Just like his eyes. He could rest here for a while or forever, but he forces his weary head up to regard the space he’s in.

And a figure in a faded leather floats above him. He forms his left hand into a fist and the Mark weakly pulses a flow of flood.

“You bastard,” he manages.

There is no reply.  
  
The edges get sharper in his vision and Corvo props himself off on elbows to bring the figure into focus. The Outsider isn’t moving at all. And his head is covered in a burlap sack and there’s giant iron links chained around him, heavy enough to sink anything to the bottom of the ocean. His hands are forced back by the chains.  
  
Corvo sways unsteadily to his feet and reaches out with trembling fingers towards the sack and pulls it off. It remains floating in the air.

It’s a discolored skeleton dressed like the Outsider. The jaw sewn shut with thick copper wire. The breath comes quick and furious through Corvo’s nostrils and he howls with rage and reaches towards the skull to fling it out the the whale’s eye socket.

But when his fingers brush the bone, his stomach lurches as everything compresses towards the skull, all the islands, all the trials he passed, the Void itself. It’s a black hole and when everything is black, it’s just him and the skull and it swallows Corvo up, his whole being forced by nail, by finger, then by arm, and rib cage and toes through its mouth and for one (blessed) moment, there is nothing at all.  
  
Until Corvo jerks awake with his heart hammering, slumped in the velvet chair, the only evidence of sleep being his crusted eyelids and Emily sleeping ungracefully, her legs splayed and the covers thrown to the side and her face planted firmly into the pillow.  
  
He looks down at his lap to see his metal mask staring up at him, a grin peeling its mouth open and a glint in the left lense, like a wink.  
  
***

The dark whaling yards loom along the water’s edge, like quiet sentinels forming a wall. The ones nearest to Corvo buzz with activity, even though dawn is hours away. Perched on the roof, he clicks the gears on the side of his mask and zooms inside the streaky, grimey windows. A long line of large, cast-iron pots shimmer the air around them with heat as workers in pairs work criss-crossed lines into the suspended whale’s flesh with long, terrible knives. A few wheel the roughly cut, jiggling squares to the wheelbarrows and load the pots before lighting a fire underneath each one. In a day or three, they will strip the whale to its bones and grind up even those bones, and another whaling trawl will lumber in and deposit its kill.

Corvo stands up and reaches into one of his pockets with his tightly bandaged hand, past the sleeping darts, and checks his chained watch ticking inaudibly. _Good,_ he thinks, _I have an hour before they come with their faith and its sharp edges and bullets._  
  
He leaps and manages to land one bent leg on the roof of the whaling yard he was spying on before and scrambles up to the peak. Abandoned whaling yards stand forlorn far in the distance, no light nor activity discernible from its windows. His quarry is in one of these, the whispers of the overseers said as much. The dregs of morality, heretics that laugh in the face of order, fornicators with witchcraft and demons.

Fascinating people. To _him._ And Corvo will dance with them or he will strike them down, anything to bring sunken eyes and eternity materializing out of the Void.

The roof tiles clatter against each other as Corvo runs down them and he leaps off the edge to an air duct, his body makes a dull thump. It angles to the top and he clambers on each step inelegantly and without a fair bit of noise. No matter, the workers would be unable to distinguish the dull thud of Corvo steps from the rumble of the try pots and the slick splats of the blubber.

Clambering up to the apex, he runs down, his body angled up from the angle of the roof and he flies off, his legs bent like the roof he lunged off of. He lands and leaves the occupied whaling yard in the distance, steam sneaking out in tiny lines, like the whole roof is the lid to a boiling pot.  
  
The cold air he sucks in through his mouth chills the burlap lined with sateen that covers his face under the metal mask. The air rustles his hood and it sneaks in to kiss his hair stands and the back of his neck and there is no sweat, no effort in Corvo’s body as he leaps roof to roof, up and then down, his coat catching and snapping in his wake.

The whaling yards deteriorate the further Corvo gets, the tiles slide and crack underfoot and peeling paint flakes and falls as he rushes past. The white paint and chalk and black charcoal and lines increase, too, the words, and crude skulls, the criss-crossed bone charms. The ones that missed the scrubbing and the suds. Accusations and praises and curses and slander and lies decked in truth, they rush past him in a blur and disappear at the edge of his mask’s lenses. The lights dwindle and disappear until everything is coated in an even blue through the colored glass of the lenses.

He runs down one yard with loose, chipped tiles and plants his heel on the edge of the tile and his stomach jumps into his throat as the tile flips from his weight and falls with him towards the concrete ground. His left hand clenches and his body seizes up before he hits the ground.

And he lands on the edge of the roof of the yard he jumped to, not even his weight makes a sound as his knees meet the dilapidated roof tiles. A shiver escapes as chilly tendrils withdraw from the most forward-facing parts of his body and dissipate off his back, his hair, his shoulders and the Void leaves only a vague chill in the air. A dull glow pulsates then dims under bandages and Corvo clenches his mouth and forces his throat closed from what he thinks is bile rising from his stomach.

But it is a laugh he swallows.  
  
He stands up with barely a rustle and reaches into his pouch on the left and draws out his clock. Fifteen rotations of the rapidly moving hand before they come. Fifteen for him to slice or put to sleep and dispose or hide. Fourteen when he grips his left fist into pain and loathing clogs up his head as he closes his eyes and sighs shakily as the Void pools into his body like cool water filling him up, one vein at a time. Corvo opens to a world that is colorless and bright and the fascinating things glow green and the people glow like great lighthouses with beacons of bright yellow.

People. And they’re right below him. A cluster of five, three hunched in a corner and two that seem to be standing, keeping watch.  
  
He crouches low to the roof and stalks his way to a broken ceiling window in the corner of the roof, barely noticeable in the shadow of the hours before dawn. His body slips in soundlessly and he lands on a rusted beam that connects to perpendicular beams all along the whole of the abandoned whaling hard. The cluster of three seem to be sleeping amidst the disused try pots, bundled in tarps. The other two huddle together silently, the smaller one nervously looking around, a mop of mousy brown hair on top.  
  
Corvo can easily fall from the beams and sink his blade into one and then slide the blade through the other before the other’s body hits the floor. His blade flips out as the point slides out in between the four prongs and he falls forward, his coat spreads like wings. The smaller one looks up and in a fraction of an instant Corvo’s blade sinks into flesh as his knees barrel into her shoulders and slide down to rest on her chest, her body on the floor and blade embedded in a slice into her left hand, each twitch pumping out a rivulet of blood.

The glow on her left hand weakly illuminates the terror on her face and the shining blood from her mouth as her companion screams and rouses the three in the pots. The sleepers jump and cling to each other as the smallest one between them starts to whimper. The companion of the one pinned beneath Corvo fumbles at the ground to grab a rusted pipe bent askew and holds it with trembles, screaming with cracks in her voice at Corvo to get off her.  
  
Her. The girl beneath him, her mouth twisted, as if about to erupt into a sob. _Children._

They’re just _children._ Their clothes are overlarge on them and their awkward gangly limbs stick out like branches from their body, their bodies not yet filling them out. Just like Emily.

Corvo slides back on his knees and pulls his knife out and the girl sobs tonelessly and pulls her knees in, cradling her hand, the Outsider’s mark like scratches in her hand beneath the delta of blood blossoming from its center. Her companion takes an uneasy step forward, the pipe trembling still in her hands.

“Why?” he asks quietly, backing up as the other girl, taller with a mess of black on top under her cap and olive skin dirtied by grime and what else, rushes in front to form a barrier between the one on the ground and Corvo.

She swallows visibly when her eyes drop to the bandaged left hand. The look in her eyes is a dagger glistening with tears. She stutters out her answer.

“To p-protect. C-cause her mom d-did.”

Corvo hears her answer but he did not ask her. He asked _him._

And he does not answer, staying silent as always.  
  
Only a barely audible bark answers.

“They’re just children,” Corvo whispers to no one, looking outwards. He turns back towards the girl with the pipe. “Take her and hide with the others. _Now._ ”

The girl with the pipe opens her mouth to form a protest, but nothing comes out and the pipe drops with a dense clang and she pulls her friend to her shaky knees, the blood from her hand slides to darken her sleeves but it catches the drops from staining the floor. They half drag and crawl their way to the others. A few hurried whispers later, each of them hides in a partially open try pot, with the injured one being helped into one first before her black-haired friend hides next to her.  
  
The barking and the clamor swells in volume and the shadows pull at the edges of Corvo’s coat as he melts into them and the door lifts with a shrill wail. Seven overseers with gold masks that look like they’re floating in the dark enter, one with a stern hand on a leash with a snarling hound at its end. The dark hound, with eyes that shine with the hunt, pulls its owner towards the spot Corvo fell on the girl and Corvo mutters a curse silently when the hound puts his nose to the floor and drags the group to the pots.  
  
The hound goes on its hind legs and dangles its front legs into the pot. It pokes its snout in and barks as a high scream echoes from the pot. The handler overseer pulls his hound back and reaches in and pulls one of the young boys up by the scarf around his neck, a nervous, sniveling thing that could be the black-haired girl’s brother.

“How many of you are here?” the overseer demands.

When the boy doesn’t answer, the overseer whistles and the hound growls and snaps at his face and the boy starts to whimper, snot and tears running in trails down his face. His pants start to leak urine as he soils himself. The overseer drops him back into the pot in disgust.  
  
“Should we search all these pots, sir? There’s dozens of them here.”  
  
“No, easier to light them all.” All the gold masks turn to the one furthest back. “Capture the ones that escape.”  
  
“And if one or more of the heretics should perish?”  
  
“Less to train, we have plenty of recruits already, and none of them this young. Light them.”

They move forward and Corvo surfaces from the shadows, his left hand clenches and then he’s on all fours, muscle rippling through his whole body with a mouth full of too many teeth. The dog is in there with him but he can feel him whimper and recede from Corvo’s mind. He twists his body and wrenches free of the overseer and he leaps and closes each jaw on either side of the overseer’s face. There’s garbled shouting in his ears as he twists his head to toss the mask aside and feels the tip of his fangs press then enter into the soft neck. Iron floods his mouth and shallow fingers try to dig into his fur and he can’t help but roll his tongue in and the whole sensation is metallic and electrifying. He jerks his head and he comes away with a hunk of meat, warm, and still bleeding from its sides.

He turns and regards the remaining seven overseers, their shouts a garble in his ears, pulling out their pistols and swords and he kicks off with his gigantic back legs at the nearest one. Then his head explodes in red and fiery pain and Corvo staggers backwards gripping his head through mask and hood as the hound’s body barrels into the floor, its front legs crumpling below and the rest of the body following.

No time to waste. No time at all as he over-stretches the bandages on his hands and the mark glows while the world bleeds itself dry of color.  
  
His feet slide as if on water and his right hand catches the handle of the unfurled blade and it appears on both sides of the nearest overseer’s head, and the next, his hand feels the scrap of bones it is wedged between as it pulls out. The next two have their heads slightly lifted and he traces the tip below in a perfect horizontal arch, knowing that when the color returns, the line will cascade blood unto the floor. The fifth manages to move so slowly only to turn his head towards Corvo as he swings his arm up, the prongs on his blade catching on his mask and chin and a red-adorned blade sprouts from the top of his head.

Color floods in and two barrels stare at him as he struggles to extract his blade. He crouches, bracing himself against the slumped chest of the overseer, his blade almost free. Shots cut through their shouts and the body jerks as bullets hit the dead body, Corvo can feel every impact. After he counts twelve, he leaps and his knees hit the chest of the nearest and his blade has already dug three narrow holes into his chest by the time the back of his head crashes to the floor. He jumps up as the last one, now backed up near the pots, levels his pistol and sees his trigger finger squeeze.

Corvo’s hand loosens and his arm tightens around his saber as he readies a throw but stops when the overseer’s whole body jerks and twitches and his pistol arm bends up. There’s a gurgling sound and spittle appears at the edge of his mouth hole as his shaking hand bends towards his head, the pistol clattering in his grip. A bang and the overseer’s whole body slackens and two thumps are heard, the pistol’s crash audible a full instant after.  
  
The mousy girl is crumpled in an unconscious heap behind the overseer, his blood pooling and touching the edge of her dirty shoe. The other children trip and clamor out of their pots and rush to her, with the black-haired girl parting them and pulling the girl’s torso up as vomit leaks from the corners of her mouth, mixing with the blood already on her chin. They look all at Corvo as he stands over them. No thanks, just sullen looks.

They remain silent and sullen as they help Corvo drag the overseer bodies to the edge of the water by their legs, the mousy girl left propped up against the wall, bundled in rags and passed out. They each hold a gold mask or two and leave the water edge, trying their best to ignore the bubbling and crunching in the water behind them. The gold masks ding and chime as they’re tossed into the farthest try pot, the lid groans and rust dusts off as Corvo drags the top on, grunting, the children looking on.  
  
Dawn teases the very edge of the sky when Corvo returns to the yard via the roofs, rapping softly on the pots tucked in the corner and leading them to the water edge, carrying the mousy one over his shoulder like a sack. The water looks no more brown than usual despite the feeding frenzy less than an hour ago. A put of a motor cleaves through the brown water and Corvo stares down at a familiar face, stern disapproval with remnants of concern warping Samual’s otherwise friendly face.

“I thought you were done with this. With that.” Samual inclines his head towards the mask.

“I am.” The children climb onto his boat, huddling together and looking at neither of their benefactors, the mousy one half on the boat’s floor, her head in the black-haired one’s lap.

“Bullshit,” he answers, as he starts up the motor and the boat lurches back, frothing the brown water and disturbing the sluggish, bloatedl hagfish. Corvo watches his boat join the current of the Wrenhaven and he stalks back to the whaling yard under a black sky rusting at its horizon.  
  
He enters the now-empty yard, his boots making audible sounds on the floor. He strides to the dark stains and scuffs them with his boot, only worsening the streaks. With a sigh, he looks around to find a corner with a heap of sand and dirt, with some conveniently placed dinged and dented and rusted buckets next to it. He nears it and stops.

There’s a drone in his head. Not like the hum of Samuel’s boat, or the rumble of a whaling trawl. It’s a drone with pitches and shifts and tones and it buzzes in his ears. Gazing around, he spots a large plank propped up against the wall next to the heap of sand, a very faint glow coming from under.

A lavender glow.  
  
He does not walk, he runs to it and wrenches the plank backwards and it crashes to the floor, bouncing a bit.

Vibrant purple fabric swoops from a table and falls down, held up with haphazard nails. The almost gutted candles flicker weakly in their cages of iron wrapped in purple at the table’s base, yet they seem to fill the room and Corvo’s whole vision with blue and purple.

And on its three legs, the table presents its gift, a bleached section of white with old, textured metal at its edges. In the middle of the rune, a tongue, roughly cut and looking wet, nailed to its center. A small tongue.

Corvo staggers back and meets soft resistance. He whirls around.

“Hello, Corvo,” greets the Outsider.  
  
It’s his always nonchalant tone, it’s the constant way his black eyes look at everything, it’s his pale hands folded behind and back and the listless tilt of his head that sends Corvo snarling. He springs forward, his hands wrapped around a pale throat between leather and linen and they fall to the floor in between the pots, the blood, the decay. Corvo’s thumbs press deep as they can into the bump of his throat until bone is felt, his other fingers wrapped around the back, black hair tickling his joints. The Outsider lies still, like a corpse already cooled, Corvo above him, his knees on either side of his stomach, leaning into his squeeze. 

A moment passes before the Outsider arms bend up to grasp feebly at Corvo’s hands around his neck, his mouth falling open, his head tilting back. His fingers are cold even through blue twill. Corvo’s thumbs press and press and they cave and break skin and he digs nails into larynx, watching the corners of the Outsider’s mouth leak the blackest blood and he shakes all around. Corvo can feel it through his body, each tremble and shake and resistance and kick, as his thumbs and the edge of his sleeves stain with black.

The Outsider’s left hand manages to grab one of the wires stitching the mask’s jaws together and pulls it, the mask flips about and around, landing each time with a clang and settles some distance away. Corvo blinks as his vision clears into colors from the blues. His eyes, his black eyes, are all wrong. There’s a shine to them like the first time they met, and Corvo can see interest reflecting back at him. His grip slackens, and the Outsider goes still, his hands falling to the sides.

“I thought that performance would be pleasing to you,” remarks the Outsider, looking up at him, somehow, with his directionless eyes. His left hand rises to reach past hood and cold fingers brush Corvo’s stubble on his cheek. “But it seems you cannot enjoy it while wearing this mask.”

The caress turns forceful and Corvo’s vision rotates completely around and his head makes a muted thud as it hits the floor. His lungs press out air as the Outsider straddles his torso, his knees bent at Corvo’s sides. His cold hand still on his face, soft again, so gentle on Corvo’s cheek. Leaning over, Corvo’s skin tingles as he feels the Outsider draw his face near to his, so close that his cold breath cools Corvo’s bottom lip.

“But I can kiss this one.” He does, with a dry peck on Corvo’s chapped lower lip. It’s infuriating, for reasons that conflict and clash. Corvo’s hands fly up to grip the Outsider’s arms above his elbows, squeezing through leather, the shirt underneath, flesh, and the Void.

“How _dare_ you, after all you’ve put me through.” He tries to shake the entity off, to flip him over, to rise above him. To be the one on top. But he remains as steadfast as a mountain rising above a flooded world. The Outsider raises his other hand and frames Corvo’s face, his skin looks white against Corvo’s tanned skin. There’s a curve in the corner of his mouth that Corvo cannot stop gazing at.

“Me?” The curve at his mouth pulls the rest into a small, tight smile that only seems to widen as he tilts his head. He leans in, and he injects no tone into his words as he whispers into Corvo’s left ear.

“I wasn’t _here._ ”

The grip on Corvo’s face softens as the quiet words ring and bounce off the inside of Corvo’s ears. “I sang with a man while he was tied to a pole being burned alive for patricide in Pandyssia. I swam with a pod of whales and named their orphans after three stars that fell into the Void an eternity ago. I drank wine from a new vineyard in Serkonos and had a pleasurable conversation with the trees about its new benefactor, who is boring. Tell me, how long has it been since our last, my dear? A week? A month? I’m afraid I’ve lost track of time.” 

Corvo’s head draws back as he swallows visibly. His ear brushes the Outsider’s lips. “You’re lying. The chills, the Heart, the rat, the Void, that was all your doing.”

The Outsider pulls away from his ear, the absence of his presence is somehow warmer, and he hovers his face too close to Corvo’s. Corvo’s eyes watch the glint in them dance as the Outsider gazes long and deep until he’s so sure that the pale man can read everything outlined and detailed in his wide pupils.

“Has it been a year? Time has not treated you kind. Shall I talk to her?” His small smile is shallow and does not suit him.

“Don’t play games!” Corvo jerks and only manages to drive his crotch uncomfortably up into the Outsider’s rear and he bites on his lips and trickles blood. The amusement in the Outsider’s face brings a pink flush to Corvo’s cheeks.  
  
“ _I wasn’t here._ Think me lying if it comforts you.” His right thumb touches the red spot on Corvo’s lower lip and drags iron across, the Outsider watches its trail with intent. Air is painful in Corvo’s chest as he fights the rapid breaths flaring through his nostrils.

“Did I bore you? Is that why you tortured me from afar? Gave your curse to a _girl?_ ” Corvo spits. The pale one only tilts his head, the muscles look unnatural in his overextended neck. A red trail follows his thumb down to Corvo’s chin, rough with pricks of stubble.

“Do you know what happens when a fish jumps out of water and remains without for a long time? It _suffocates._ It thrashes its little body around, flipping over and over until it touches water again with his wide, wide mouth.” The Outsider leans forward to press his lips to Corvo’s chin, it is cold and he shivers and it seems to him that the Outsider has become heavier. The Outsider comes away with a spot of red on his lower lip that he does not bother to lick away. He is so much paler-looking with that spot of blood. “I left because you were only interesting. I came back because you are now _fascinating._ The twelve-year-old girl?Not the least bit interesting, but I am not cruel. Do you believe me capable of pity for a grief-crazed girl who just cut off her own tongue for me?”  
  
“I do not need you, or the Void.” His voice is quiet, shaky with doubts and something else, something Corvo tries to force away. 

The Outsider’s tone is frustratingly even and calm. “You reached for the Void and shivered because of it that day. That night, all the rats in Dunwall Tower smelled your longing and your want and they undid the bonds to your Heart. Sadly, one of them perished in the process.”  
  
“No, you’re lying.” Corvo shakes his head, disbelief crumbling in his widening eyes, the smell of the rotten rat is far too easy to recall.  
  
“Then you _finally_ breathed the Void and its tide took you there while I was not home, and your face was so pleased to find you again.” He draws in close, Corvo cannot see anything else but this pale face with dark, sunken eyes.

“The witch hunt...” his voice trails off listlessly as realization floods his whole self.

“Coincidence, I’m afraid. You miss the Void, and the Void misses _you,_ my dear.” All Corvo has to do is purse his lips to touch the Outsider’s. Time seems to still as everything hands suspended in that space.

Time resumes again when Corvo dares to ask the question. “Aren’t you the Void itself?”  
  
Corvo can almost feel the smile still on his lips as the Outsider closes the gap, his lips with that spot of red fall slightly apart and take Corvo’s chapped ones in his own. The touch shocks Corvo’s mouth open and a cold, soft, and all-too-wet texture pressed itself in between. It presses itself here and there in Corvo’s mouth and he vaguely tastes of salt. But it feels all too human, still and Corvo is overeager as he tastes that tongue with his own.  
  
Teeth clink against teeth and Corvo bites down on the Outsider’s lips before he does and the pale being laughs into their shared space. It is no use, the Outsider devours his tongue, his teeth, his lips, and his breath and all Corvo can taste, can breathe, is him. Corvo tries to suck in a breath but only sucks at the inside of the Outsider’s mouth. A twist and a shuddering gasp peels him away, the Outsider looking not the least bit flustered, the only change being that look in his endless eyes. Intent laced with hunger, it tickles the back of Corvo’s spine, all the way up.

He shouldn’t. He does. He does so before his mind can remind me how terrible this being is, how terrible to follow this rabbit hole all the twisted ways down, how terrible that he is prisoner to his deep, deep needs and him most of all. His thoughts get suffocated by him and by his mouth which presses forward to suck everything, absolutely everything from him as Corvo hands tremble themselves awake and find their ways under leather, under linen, hands cooled by his cold skin.  
  
Cold hands slide off Corvo’s face and withdraw to his jacket. Corvo watches out the corner of his eye as his fingers almost lazily, with an inhuman evenness and pace, pull each buckle on his coat apart, a light click for each one. He could (he has) undo his coat without hands, snap them away, have them dissolve in a swirling mass of black. But this is a show for Corvo, and Corvo alone, and the bony shoulders covered loosely in white emerge from brown leather. The coat slaps the ground when it lands.

Corvo sees his hands outlined in shadows under the Outsider’s linen shirt. The white shirt parts button by button to reveal pale torso and Corvo’s hands appear so tanned on his pale skin. His hands are covered by white hands and the Outsider guides them down, past waistband and smooth skin slides under his fingertips. Corvo’s hands twitch and grasp around when the Outsider rolls his hips so calmly down, he wants to hold all of him all at once (he never can).

The Outsider pulls away, his tongue peeking from between his lips and Corvo only manages to half-shiver from his undone trousers before he throws his head back with a soundless yell, lifting his torso, his shoulders back. Everything shrinks to just wet lips and wet tongue on over-sensitive nerves and Corvo’s fingers find coarse, black hair at their ends. The Outsider takes more and more of him in his mouth and the ground is hard as Corvo forces himself to keep his hips still. His knees fall away from each other, he draws his heels up and it drags his coat up with him.

He doesn’t dare look at him, his head with his messy mop of black framed between his knees, swallowing him down and down, his hands buried in his black hair. Those black eyes would stare at him and he would go tumbling over in release, and then everything else would all too soon come rushing in to drown him. His title, the Abbey and its recently-deceased members, his seats and her seats and all their rights, the whole Empire itself and it’s tiny ruler all in white on waves of regret and loathing. But for now they are just small ripples lapping at his focus. There is guilt, but he swallows it down as much as the Outsider swallows him down.

That sweet wet pressure and sensations withdraw and tension seeps out and Corvo slumps into the floor, his chest heaving. He’s dimly away of a breeze on his chest, his chest and shirt had been undone somehow. His trousers are only open and he starts to drift his hands down to undo them for the Outsider when a single finger presses into his sternum and it keeps Corvo down. The Outsider’s face looms at him, his eyes glinting so bright and a smile that could bewitch all of eternity.

“Not this time, my dear,” he breathes so quietly, a shadow of something too real in his face as he slides down on Corvo and takes him deep inside, his bare pale legs straddling either side of Corvo. Disbelief escapes Corvo’s mouth with a moan and the pale entity’s cold weight does little to cool his burning body. His body seizes up and there is no coaxing his muscles to move; he can scarcely remember his name.

So, the Outsider moves instead. He lifts himself off and sinks back down and each rolling bounce seems to take Corvo deeper and deeper. He slips in between pale thighs and the muscles along those thighs tense and clench and it coaxes another moan from Corvo’s lips. The Outsider’s back curls softly back, his white shirt slips off one lone shoulder, his head lolls to the side and an almost audible sigh nearly leaves his slightly parted lips.

Corvo expected control, black eyes devoid of expression, and a pace that is mechanically even, and a stiff manner and stiff body. The being slamming up and down as his hair floats against gravity, his hands spread and pressed into Corvo’s exposed chest, is not a hole wrapped in a man, but just a hole that consumes and consumes and hungers for more and falls prey to even his own lust. There is no rhythm, only hurry and force as the Outsider takes him in and in again after every rise, his head back, a sigh barely on his lips. He does not feel like a man (he isn’t one) and feels too much like one, he is just a hole that Corvo wants to slip into (he is).

A throaty laugh issues from the Outsider as Corvo’s fevered hands grip the bare jut of his hipbones and the jerk of his hips from below reverberate along his whole body and delight shines in his black eyes. Corvo’s hips find the Outsider’s and they clash so close that neither can tell who is dominant, who is penetrating, who is in control. There are moans from both, they come together like their bodies.

Fill, fill again, pressure, and friction, nothing else until there is truly nothing at all and Corvo’s perception shrinks to their joined parts and he slices deep gouges into skin that doesn’t bleed and fills the tiny, tiny, space between him and himself with white with a pointed, sustained thrust and a long, long moan. The squeeze that follows lock them together and Corvo sputters and jerks as he empties everything, himself, into the Outsider. There’s an answering sigh and slick drops spread out in a fan on his torso, and trails of his own seed wet the space between his twitching thighs.

The feeling of nothing persists in all of Corvo, until he is only distantly aware that the nothing feels like floating. Or falling or both. The Outsider seems all around him, the presence is close by, and all around him, like the ocean on all sides while underwater. Corvo does not feel his arms, his legs, only a blank head, and the sensation of water all around. The longer he floats (or falls), the more it seems the water, the Void, whatever is around him, he is only a current in it. There is only a lavender glow in his hazy vision.

Hands that feel a part of him and not at all touch his face delicately, they are neither cold nor warm. The ocean kisses him on his lower lip, and it smiles at him with deep eyes. It would matter nothing, but he asks anyway, his voice is only a drop in water.

“Am I floating or falling?”  
  
The ocean does not answer, it only kisses him again, a tiny wave on the lips.

“Will you catch me?” Corvo asks.

“No,” answers the emptiness, as it plants a kiss on Corvo’s brow.

***

She’s forgotten the sound of her own voice and the color her hair used to be, but she does not forget _him._ The room shakes with each pound of the door below, like a litany struggling to be heard. The dead overseer’s body has stiff limbs and makes him look like a discarded puppet with strings cut. In a day, he will be more akin to a rag-doll without its head.

One of her charges had taken the mask off his face and with luck, will get enough to feed herself and her three companions for a week. The realization of never seeing them again would make her wail if she still had a voice to wail with. She hasn’t had one for years.

With the knife, the tongue cuts like a choice meat from a tender part of a cow. She places it delicately in front of the head, it shines purple from the faded, hasty drapes around it. The eyes are somewhere in the dirty room, she had scooped them out with a rusty spoon and the gaping black holes in the young man’s head ooze nostalgic for her.

She overlays her wrinkled hand with its wrinkled mark on the tongue, and she does not pray. Only entreats, and mouths the words with her chapped lips. The pounding continues below, now with an accompaniment of splintering wood. She offers her life, bargains her everything, just for a glow to spark on her left hand and enough time for the little ones that slipped through the trap door, a gold mask in one of their unmarked hands.  
  
The white candles flicker, their flames bleed purple and the chill at her back brings a mounting terror and joy to her bent, bent frame. The mark on her hand itches and her drapes ripple as the Outsider slides into reality, his hands folded, his black eyes the pits to the fabric of everything. He clucks his tongue.

“A tad overdramatic and overused, but you are in an hour of need, and here I am.”  
  
The old woman falls back and lands on her bony hips, sending pain like pokers up her body. A rasp clicks from her throat as she points her marked hand at the Outsider, her finger trembling, eyes wide and fearful. She cannot say the words, but the Outsider hears them all the same.

“This?” He unfolds his arms and runs his pale fingers along the gold trim bordering blue twill, his hands slipping over each button. His smile is framed by long, brown hair on either side, floating like the air all-around is water.

“It’s new.”

**Author's Note:**

> Yes there is totally a Song of Ice and Fire reference in there, I'm sorry.


End file.
